07 September 2012

After working with and owning several startups, it is clear that startup owners regularly overload themselves with work. It’s part of the startup mythos. The problem is, overwork kills lots of startups. The pace set is unsustainable and the endeavor collapses.

A few very important things where Lean Startup can be informed by Lean Lean.

First - Limiting work in progress is key to finishing things. You can't do more work than you can handle.

Second - Visualize the work - get it out of your head. There are too many variables and too many changes in context. You can better manage what you can see.

Third - Manage the flow, not the tasks - you are a startup, you will always have tasks. Working yourself to death will only result in your death. The flow of work is what is important - what can you produce, at what rate, and of quality.

Fourth - Kill Lists - Lists lack context, they age-out within hours, they leave you with no reasonable record of work done. They are the index of a map - even if read the entire index, you'll never understand the terrain.

Fifth - Prioritize Last - Making a long list and prioritizing up front is un-Lean. Most of your listed items will change in substance and priority as you do your work. With a visualized system, you prioritize / select work on-the-fly.

Sixth - Learn Cynefin - Understand that you will never know which of your tasks are simple, complicated, or complex. Some of them will bite you in the ass. If you outsource a task and think it's simple, but it is complicated or complex, you will end up working harder to manage the contractor than you would have doing the work.

Startup work is inventive - it is creative. Spend your time inventing the product and not reacting to the workload. Again, as Adrian said, this may mean some long days, but don't overdo it. Your brain is the only thing you have to make money from here. If you overwork it, it will underperform for you.

So learn from Lean, set up a Personal Kanban or any other type of kanban, and start visualizing your work. Steve Blank says "Get Out of the Building."

27 June 2012

We say that kanban is a visual control, but we also eschew external control (rules) being placed on us by others. So what does control really mean? We when we look at it, we have a lot of depth here.

(1) Like a dial – a controller

We can use our kanban as a controller for our work. We can adjust our WIP limits, the people doing the work, the throughput of various work-item-types, the granularity at which we track our work. We have a number of dials we can tweak to control our work.

(2) Controlling action through constraints

The kanban itself places constraints on our work. It enforces policies we have set. The WIP limits, the value stream, what is allowed and when, and so forth are controlled using the board.

(3) Controlled experiments

When we hypothesize something can be done to alleviate a bottleneck or some other item inhibiting flow, we can run controlled experiments using sour board as the laboratory. We can make small changes and measure their impacts directly.

(4) Communications Control

The board, in real-time, is a control center – communicating status, activity, bottlenecks, completion rates, issues, staff availability, and more. It is the switchboard of your team.

It’s important for us to grasp that “control” means many things. This helps us envision more creative and robust controls.

12 June 2012

Following last year’s excellent “Seattle Lean Camp”, we are now nearing Kaizen Camp: Seattle 2012. (We did have a name change, so as not to confuse us with another set of camps with the same name.)

This year, Kaizen Camp is the July 24-25. Again we are at the beautiful Center for Urban Horticulture. We also have award-winning food trucks (with vegetarian options) catering the event. So, no boring food! The event is nearly half full already, with attendees from software, government, health care, manufacturing, education, and more.

The diversity of ideas and voices are unparalleled – which is exactly what we were searching for. Lean ideals and principles will be discussed. People share success stories as well as challenges. Different disciplines work together to create new ideas. Continuous Improvement is explored.

Last year we were blessed with great conversation, learning, food, and near gender parity. This year looks even better.

01 June 2012

The Lean Software and Systems Consortium (LSSC) has evolved to the Lean Systems Society (LSS). I was never a member of LSSC, but I am a founding fellow of LSS. Why?

LSSC was a very necessary institution to begin talking about Lean in software development. With LSSC, we had several awesome conferences that rapidly increased the level of thought, range of adoption, and inclusion of new groups.

However, LSSC’s mission was very open-ended. Talks with LSSC ranged from setting up free communities to instituting scrum.org style certification for Capital K Kanban. I want to be clear here that I really love the LSSC people – it’s just that my voice was better used from the outside of the organization, always discussing new ideas and ways to expand the community beyond Software.

LSS is an entirely different animal. It is only focused on discussing new ideas and ways to expand the community beyond software. So … it seems to fit me better!

Along with this transition comes two things that I want to talk about:

Thing 1: LSSC 2012

This year’s conference felt different. I think we did a few things that gave this year’s LSSC a bit of slack.

Calmer Content

This is the part where I get to talk about how wrong I was. So, I’m all big into setting up unconferences and putting the people in charge of the content. This year, at LSSC we had a few track chairs (mercifully few!) who were responsible for populating the content in their tracks. The speakers this year were awesome, the quality of the presentations was stellar, and the smaller number of tracks meant that people could focus.

I was initially unhappy with the decision to go this way – but in the end it made for a fantastic conference.

Start Loud

This year we started with a one-day unconference, a community meeting, a special event (Lean Action Kitchen), and a reception. This year just started fun and thoughtful. We built up a great momentum on the first day.

In addition, each day started with a Lean Coffee that went from last year’s one table to three to five tables a day.

Centralized Vendors in a Fun Location

Rather than having the vendors off in some removed part of the building, this year they were right at the center of everything. The vendors helped this by becoming “snack central” as well – it seemed like everyone had food. The space was also light and airy – which is something I noticed about the entire conference – the whole thing seemed less cramped and dark.

Thing 2: The LSS Mission Statement

The Lean Systems Society believes that excellence in managing complexity requires accepting that complexity and uncertainty are natural to social systems and knowledge work. Effective systems must produce both better economic and sociological outcomes. Their development requires a holistic approach that incorporates the human condition. The Society is committed to exploring valuable ideas from all disciplines, and fostering a community that derives solutions from a common set of values and principles, while embracing specific context and avoiding dogma.

There’s nothing I can’t get behind here. This is an outward facing, humanistic, respectful approach to business, learning, and people.

This year I was lucky enough to win a Brickell Key award, which is given every year to two people in recognition of their work in this community. This meant a lot to me, because my focus has been often beyond software and my style of presentation is sometimes, shall we say, nonchalant.

This award was especially rewarding for me, given that this year I really feel like the community has really come into its own. This has been an exciting movement to be a part of and I look forward to what comes next.

29 March 2012

The gentleman next to me took out his laptop and began typing, he had a large pile of wine labels and a notebook filled with wine notes. He began systematically copying them into his laptop. I figured he was a wine critic.

Other work he went on to do involved software development and airplanes so my curiosity overtook me and we began to talk. It turned out that he was a software developer that worked with airplanes. But … he was also a noted wine critic enthusiast. He had been to the Pacific Northwest of the US on a wine excursion as a guest of the major wineries. He had been all over Washington and Oregon tasting.

When I was in my 20s, I decided I wanted to be a wine snob. So I went and took courses on wines, read books, and started a collection. I became rather good at it. So good, in fact, that I found I wasn’t actually enjoying wine any more. I was always critiquing it. I could always find something not quite right.

I told him this and he smiled and said, “wine is to enjoy, not to judge.”

We will always suffer from snobbery – to this day, I cannot listen to music from laptop speakers. And I know more than my share of agile adherents who actively hate every team they come into contact with because of their flaws.

We tend to fall in love with our ideas and nothing kills romance like familiarity. Richard Dawkins once said, “There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence.”

We do this all the time with our work. We get excited about a task or an idea and we go deep. Too deep. Beneath the layer of effort that separates excitement from boredom. From energizing to draining. From inspiration to drudgery.

We might call this “depth in progress”. Just like we can have too much work in progress, we can also have too much depth. It’s simply doing too much of something. We go beyond what would be an acceptable level of completion and strive for “perfection.”

“The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.” ~Ben Okri

At some point on the path to perfection, we pass the point of diminishing returns. After that point, our efforts do not return profit, only waste. In our pursuit of perfection, we identify all the things that cannot be perfect and then strive to perfect them. Yet, the imperfect is always with us. It is where growth resides.

Yet the need for growth, and the imperfection, will always be there. We end up in a doom loop of reductio-ab-absurdum – we manage our products as if the end product were a fine diamond that would last centuries. Well, it took the planet millions of years to make that diamond, and we don’t have that kind of time.

Therefore we need to approach our work by asking, “What is the least amount I can do to make this task successful?” In doing this, we want to move our ticket to DONE and have it stay there. No re-work, no additional tasks created because it was incomplete.

Can that task be improved in the future? Absolutely. But for now, it is complete. We launch it, watch it work, and come back to improve upon it later if necessary.

We want to know what the minimal completed task looks like and then do that. Anything beyond is too much work. Our previous goal of “perfect” is still valid, but now it has an upper boundary. Overly polishing the task does no one any good. Because of this, perfection is no longer gilding the lily - we now recognize the lily is perfect. We want to enjoy our wine, not judge it.

05 July 2011

(This is the first in a Daily Thoughts series. I used to blog every day, but during the writing of the Personal Kanban book and creation of the Personal Kanban website, I fell out of practice. This is getting back to true blogging. Fast, unedited, perhaps a little more politically incorrect here and there.)

The agile manifesto said "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools". For years, I did not question that principle.

Now, however, I would replace this with "Collaboration over process." Here’s why:

What's happened with agile is that the rhetoric is so team empowering that it transforms teams into heroes. Like individual heroes, this divides them from the rest of the org. It turns them into inward focusing groups that are optimized for their own product and have a well constructed but ill-fitting interface into the rest of the organization. While it was team collaborative and was more collaborative with outside stakeholders, the rhetoric still focused on the teams.

But the teams are made up of individuals. And the team operates within an organization. And the team has outside resources. And the team has clients. There’s a lot going on with those outside interactions that need to be explicit.

I really took the Agile manifesto seriously. Like many, it was pinned on my office wall. I could bludgeon uncooperative employees or clients with it. I could wax eloquent about it. For me, finding its shortcomings was a painful and lengthy process. I slowly came to the realization that, as it had aged, Agile had codified, ossified, solidified into something you could easily do wrong and that was nearly impossible to do right. The words in the manifesto no longer represented what was happening in practice.

So, I began to strip away some of the trappings of over-loaded agile at my company. We replaced sprints with release cycles. We destroyed the product owner for a fully collaborative relationship with clients. When we started with kanban, it was game-on. In 2005, when we ran our first kanban driven project, we had a very different view of kanban - but even then visualization of flow almost immediately started to change how we worked.

Our process evolved rapidly during that project. At every standup people had a suggestion of how to make it better. There was a collaborative spirit not just for creating the software, but also for how the project was managed. We were no longer following a rule-book of best practices. We were building something that worked for that particular team building that particular software for that particular client.

04 February 2011

There are some projects you undertake with the idea that they will be fun and rewarding and, in their course, they become much more. Yesterday Tonianne and I launched the Personal Kanban book.

The writing process for this book was wonderful, grueling, transformational. I would take up a lot of space listing all the events of the last year. There were floods, illness, strife ... and more. The book was a huge goal for both of us. It pulled us through. Kept us afloat.

Now it's out and being sold. The outpouring of support for us over the last 24 hours has been amazing. It's like we just pushed to get to the end of a double marathon, not even realizing we'd won. Delirious and dehydrated we stumbled across the finishing line - expecting nothing more than to collapse in the grass and fall asleep.

But at the end of the race we found well-wishers. We found a party.

And we are suddenly both energized.

Where, during the race we both felt beaten and defeated, we felt the exhilaration of completion and said, "Let's do it again!"

07 October 2010

The new Personal Kanban site is on line and ready for business. Very special thank you to our friends at Marcus Bloom who are the stealth awesome designers of the year. The Personal Kanban site is much easier to read and information is much easier to find. Please take a look!

14 June 2010

My friend and microbusiness partner Jeremy is a well-rounded guy. He has a few consulting clients that give him the income he needs to get by and maybe a little more. But that doesn't take up all his time. In his spare time he's also dancer, and with his wife and a few friends is opening a Montessori school. But that doesn't take up all his time, so he worked with two other guys and myself to create iKan, the Personal Kanban iPhone app. But that doesn't take up all his time either, so he got together with a bunch of other guys and created Crowdmap an awesome shared mind mapping tool for the iPad.

So Jeremy is, as I said, my microbusiness partner. iKan is a microbusiness. The application has helped many people take their Personal Kanban with them when they are away from their home or office. But it's also only $4.99. With four partners, it would take a very long time for any of us to become wealthy from it.

But what I'm noticing is this: The new entrepeneurs the media keeps touting are not out building companies with just sweat equity. That is nothing new and completely misses the point of the transformation that is taking place.

The previous career models of "I'm going to get a stable job and go to the office every day" or "I'm going to launch a startup and we're going to become huge and make millions" are increasingly viewed as the self-defeating, zero-sum games that they are. People are recognizing that full time-work is fleeting; that at-will employment means you have no job security. And hopping from job to job is stressful and forces you to give up all self-control.

Instead, people are collecting portfolio projects with residuals that, over time, will result in reliable income streams. This is a vital distinction, because when you have a huge time-sucking job with no hope of residuals, every hour you spend working is worth a set amount – regardless of how much effort you put in or how much value you create.

This means that trade-offs between the rest of your life and work will always fall in favor of work. If your boss tells you to work until midnight during your daughter’s recital, you need to work. If you don’t, the zero-sum game means you lose disproportionately to the cost of the action. Going to the recital will always lose to not having a job and health insurance. But the action that night at work compared to your daughter’s recital? That individual trade off was likely in favor of your daughter.

Building a portfolio of microbusinesses with an underpinning of paid project work means you are building both good short and long term income opportunities. For a portfolio holder, the option of working that evening or spending quality time with your daughter will, appropriately, come down on the side of the daughter – and if it doesn’t, it will be because the trade-off was really worth it.

So Jeremy and others I know are placing themselves in a position where they can exercise life’s options with the least amount of external costs. This allows them to build not only a portfolio of projects they have worked on, but also greatly expands the portfolio of projects they canwork on. In doing this, Jeremy and others have bought themselves a great deal of freedom.

The next time you think about work/life balance, consider this: have I placed myself in a position where I pay a penalty for choosing activities outside of work? Have I placed a tariff on my own happiness? Have I left myself unable to work on projects that will make me money, expand my capabilities, and provide an interesting challenge? How many of my options have I closed off?

10 June 2010

Over the last six months, Modus Cooperandi has had the good fortune to participate in three United Nations projects. The UN's missions lend themselves well not only to collaborative management, but to lean and social media, too. While the UN will be quick to admit they aren't early adopters of the last two methods, they are nevertheless appreciative of the power of lean and social media, and are ready to begin implementing them in earnest. It's been exciting and rewarding to watch, and we feel privileged to be a part of this work.

Our three projects so far have been:

Collaboration eLearning Packages

UN Food and Agricultural Organization - Rome, Italy

Modus Cooperandi worked with a team of 20+ authors, editors, and eLearning specialists to build a comprehensive set of lessons around collaboration, community, and team building. Jim and Tonianne helped devise a group writing system using a variety of online tools to facilitate communication and collaboration. Additionally, we were principle authors on three sections of the eLearning package itself. Once complete, the system will be translated into six languages, and made available to UN staff and those interested worldwide.

OzonAction is the UNEP's group which, with the ambitious goal date of 2010, helped phase out the manufacturing of ozone depleting substances (ODS) such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Now, in its second phase, two additional ozone-depleting chemicals are on the chopping block: hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and MethylBromide. While OzonAction could certainly use their existing and successful methods to meet their deadline for the removal of these two compounds, they've chosen to incorporate social media to eradicate them ahead of schedule. Their success in the past has not made them complacent, and Modus Cooperandi is helping to create a social media plan that will provide the organization with actionable steps that won't overtax their budget or their staff. The goal here is to provide the maximum benefit for OzonAction without getting caught up in the fads or hype of the social media movement. OzonAction's goals are serious, and so their use of social media should be directed in a way to reflect that sense of gravitas.

2010 Human Development Report for Vietnam

United Nations Development Programme - Hanoi, Vietnam

Over the past two decades, with the rise of globalization, Vietnam has experienced unprecedented economic growth. With one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, Vietnam has graduated to a mid-tier economic power. For this nation in transition, the current global economic downturn has left Vietnam with both options and opportunities. Countries in the United Nations need to provide a Human Development Report (HDR) to guide policy and funding both internally and externally. In many cases, the HDR can be several years between issues, and Vietnam is no different. For this project, UNDP and the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences (VASS) have gathered researchers and scientists from several different agencies within and outside Vietnam to create the HDR. The goal of this project is to have a full-fledge HDR, with detailed and directed recommendations, ready for the Vietnamese General Congress in October. Modus Cooperandi is facilitating this effort by implementing a collaborative management system, coaching researchers on collaboration as the document is authored. Rather than merely having a document constructed of distinct sections authored by independent researchers, the goal here is to bring all the researchers together and inform the sections with one voice, and in real-time. This should result in an end-product that makes consistent points throughout, as opposed to individual points in each section. Recommendations will then be bolstered by coherent arguments threaded throughout the entire document.